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Lido Begins Validator Consolidation
Lido migrated its first validator to 0x02 withdrawal credentials, beginning the consolidation of its 8.4m staked ETH.
Happy Friday, September 18, 2026.
Lido begins consolidating 8.4 million staked ETH into Curated Module v2. Morpho launches stock-backed loans with Coinbase Tokenized Stocks. And Base introduces Validity Transactions in its upcoming Cobalt upgrade.
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Lido Consolidates First Validator
Lido migrated its first Lido Core validator from 0x01 to 0x02 withdrawal credentials, initiating the protocol-wide validator consolidation. The first validator kicks off the consolidation of 8.4 million staked ETH from Lido's legacy Curated Module to the new Curated Module v2. The migration will consolidate more than 265,000 validators into approximately 4,000 active validators with compoundable balances.
The consolidation is enabled by EIP-7251 (MaxEB), shipped in Ethereum's Pectra upgrade, which allows validators with 0x02 withdrawal credentials to have an effective balance of up to 2,048 ETH. Across the broader network, the transition is expected to reduce the total Ethereum validator set by roughly 30% and eliminate approximately 29% of consensus attestation traffic per epoch.
Stock-Backed Loans Live On Morpho
Morpho launches support for borrowing against Coinbase Tokenized Stock collateral on Base. Users can take out USDC loans at both variable and fixed rates. First introduced in June 2026, Coinbase Tokenized Stocks are 1:1 backed representations of traditional equities issued on Base, available for non-U.S. persons. The rollout supports collateral across major equities: Alphabet (GOOG), Meta (META), Nvidia (NVDA), Apple (AAPL), and the S&P 500 ETF token (SPCX).
The markets have an initial loan-to-value limit starting at 62.5% across the markets. The stock-backed lending markets also remain unavailable to U.S. persons and users in restricted jurisdictions. Morpho is a leading non-custodial credit infrastructure protocol on Base and Ethereum. Morpho allows independent risk curators deploy each market, set custom parameter configurations, and integrate compliance controls.
Base Introduces Validity Transactions
Base will introduce Validity Transactions in its upcoming Cobalt upgrade scheduled for later this month. Currently live for testing on Vibenet, the experimental protocol feature replaces standard unconditional execution with conditional block inclusion via a new RPC method. Currently, transactions included in a block execute regardless of whether target state conditions have drifted, causing failed orders to revert onchain.
Validity Transactions allow users to attach an array of offchain state predicates covering account balances, storage slot values, block numbers, or Flashblock indices to signed transactions. The Base sequencer evaluates the predicates directly against current chain state and only includes the transaction in a block if those conditions are met. The mechanism avoids losses from gas fees on failed conditional swaps without requiring offchain keeper bots or transaction relayers.
Misc News
Catch up with Ethereal news weekly #40. Koeppelmann shares an EZZ test transaction executed atomically. Across launches its ACX token buyout portal. Jumper (the bridge by lifi) is launching something, feel free to join the waitlist using my ref link.
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